Hurricane Maria was a devastating Category 5 hurricane that devastated the northeastern Caribbean in September 2017, particularly Dominica, St. Croix, and Puerto Rico. It is considered the worst natural disaster in history to affect these islands. The world’s most intense tropical cyclone in 2017, Maria is the deadliest Atlantic hurricane since Mitch in 1998, and is the tenth most intense Atlantic hurricane on record. Total monetary losses are estimated at more than $91.61 billion (2017 USD), mostly in Puerto Rico, making it the third most expensive tropical cyclone in history.
It is the seventh hurricane and second Category 5 hurricane of the extremely active 2017 Atlantic hurricane season. Hurricane Maria developed from a tropical wave on September 16, 2017, becoming the third major Atlantic hurricane in two weeks (after Hurricanes Irma and Jose).
America has a long and tragic history of deadly hurricanes. The carnage of the Great Galveston Storm of 1900 is unparalleled, but there’s also the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane that claimed 2,500 lives in Florida and the 1893 Sea Islands Storm that drowned 2,000 people in coastal Georgia and South Carolina.
But according to new data from health researchers at Harvard University, Hurricane Maria, which hit Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017, may be one of the deadliest on record. The official death toll from the Category 4 storm is 64, but scenes of destruction and stories from local hospitals hinted at a much higher number of victims.
After surveying 3,299 individual households on every inch of the island, researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that Puerto Rico’s mortality rate in the months immediately following Hurricane Maria was 62 percent higher than in the same period a year earlier.
The total number of these “excess deaths” was 4,645, making Hurricane Maria the second deadliest storm in U.S. history, claiming more American lives than 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina combined.